A glitch in the Aether Flying Races put a damper on the start of today’s Gorowyn City Festival.

From the earlier revelation that something was amiss, here’s Domino:

It does indeed appear that one of the aether race hoops has malfunctioned catastrophically over Gorowyn. The gnomish race organizers have been put to work on repairs; in the mean time the Gorowyn aether race will be postponed. We’ll keep you updated on the rescheduling.

The Gorowyn city festival remains in full swing however, and the fireworks festival and marketplace sale are expected to begin later today.

On Butcherblock, the Message of the Day (MOTD) meanwhile says this:

The Summer Fireworks Festival and the Massive Marketplace Sale have been temporarily postponed. Look for updates on their return on the /motd. Thank you for your patience!

And you thought yesterday’s update notes were short. Today’s Update Note (singular):

Tenebrous Tangle

• The quest “Follow the Bot” should once again update properly.

I would add that only a fool would believe that this is today’s only change. Every change the EQ2 team commits to the game is flagged with two kinds of notes. Private/Development notes, and Public notes. The Public notes are what we get on the patcher, on the forums, etc. Yet, nearly every update also contains tweaks, bugfixes, exploit closures, and other changes which aren’t publicized. Sometimes we can suss them out. Other times they remain a mystery. If we find out what else changed, we’ll let you know! SOE rarely comments on internal mechanics changes or exploits.

Today’s update contains just one announced line-item fix:

MARKETPLACE

• Fixed an issue with adding Credit Cards through the in-game interface.

UPDATE: SmokeJumper provided some backstory on this change:

It wasn’t a security issue. The company changed some stuff on the backend and we realized that our in-game CC registration didn’t work any longer. This is the fix for that.

Today’s update adds additional tweaks to Velious dungeons, increases the overlooked Gnomish Hoverpads to 130% runspeed, re-allows Crit Chance adornments in all the slots they were previous allowed in, a few quest glitches, and also corrects a few issues with the new Leaper and Glider mounts.

From Rothgar on the EQ2 Forums:

Just an update to let you know that maintenance is scheduled for Splitpaw tonight at 9pm PST for hardware upgrades.

This is a test of the Liveblog plugin.

Leapers and Gliders have come to EQ2 as per Today’s Update Notes., taking advantage of a tremendous effort by the EQ2 animators and programmers to allow mounts to be more quickly added to the game. With the “killer app” of flying mounts at level 86, we’ve been wondering if something would be done about the hodgepodge array of mounts at lower levels. During the week where we could have free flying mounts on all our characters, I certainly took the opportunity to knock out a bunch of quests that would have easily taken twice as long to complete on foot.

Leapers and Gliders

So let’s take a look at the new mounts.

As previously reported, Leapers are mounts which are able to jump very high, and glide for a reasonable distance. They are available at level 30 via either an Adventure or Tradeskill quest, or via the Marketplace. Gliders are mounts which are able to not only jump a remarkable height, but then glide a great distance, possibly across entire zones. They are available at level 60, also via either Adventure or Tradeskill quests.

What’s important to note here is that unlike the 5 day “waiting period” for flying mounts, Leaper and Glider mounts can be acquired through a quest that only takes about 20 minutes.

Servers are now offline, and all players have been sent packing 90 minutes after today’s Game Update was scheduled to begin. Those players who stuck around (as well as those who logged in later hoping to see the new Gliders and Leapers), chatted, dueled, and a few made progress in Kael Drakkel contested.

UPDATE: A post from SmokeJumper regarding the Content Distribution Network (CDN):

Working on it. It’s a problem with the CDN. Fixing.

Apparently, Storms players (Thanks Whilhelmina!) received an announcement that their server won’t be patched for several hours still.

We’re now 56 minutes into what is supposed to be the “Leapers and Gliders Update” yet servers from Antonia Bayle to Everfrost to Storms to Butcherblock remain online. However because of the automated scripts announcing the downtime, nobody has been able to join a dungeon, guild hall, or any other “instance”. So players continue to hang out in open areas such as Sinking Sands, Butcherblock Mountains, and ponder the meaning of life and ineptitude.

We’re all dressed up with no place to go.

If you are running the Original Launcher (EQ2.exe), you will be able to login. You won’t be able to login with Launchpad 3 however.

While we’ve heard indirectly from Silius that work on existing items from level 20-80 was being done, SmokeJumper has an official quote for us:

We have a full itemization plan in place now and we’ll be unveiling much of it at Fan Faire.

I’ll tell you this much though. We’re going to itemize *all* of the level 20-80 items by GU 61.

When asked if this includes raid Fabled items from levels 40-80:

“All” includes Raid items.

We’ve already been informed that crafted gear especially Mastercrafted gear from level 22-77 are being tweaked to have the right stats for the appropriate Archetypes. There’s also a chance that we may see a reversion of the unpopular revamp of all itemization for level 1-20 characters. Handing out coon skin caps and furs to Sarnak or Fae didn’t make a lick of sense.

We are hesitant to make any prediction about how this will all go. There are thousands of items in EQ2 with similar stats that exist mostly for appearance. We would be very disappointed to see those items washed away in favor of a single progression of items shared by all dungeon bosses and trash. We don’t know what form this revamp will take, but it seems an insurmountable amount of work to do it “right”.

No word on if we’ll see any improvement to Destiny of Velious itemization which has replaced cool items that people strive to acquire, with a stat odometer propelled by incrementally more powerful yet completely unmemorable items.

Today brings a substantial update with lots of fixes, tweaks, as well as the much-lauded introduction of Leaper and Glider mounts to EQ2 at levels 30 and 60. In a perplexing move, Ground, Leaper, and Glider mounts will all travel on the ground at speeds of up to 150%, making them as fast as any of the current Flying mounts, only lacking the differentiating ability of flight.

All servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT (3pm BST / 4pm CET) on Friday, June 24, 2011. U.S. servers are expected to be down for one hour. International servers should expect a two hour downtime.

This information is not exactly a secret, but it’s a question that comes up often. Where is your EQ2 server located? Thanks to Rothgar for the list which we supplemented.

Servers on the west coast [San Diego] include:

• Guk
• Everfrost
• Antonia Bayle (RP)
  
• Unrest
• Butcherblock
• Nagafen (PvP)
  
• Vox (PvP RG)
  
• The Bazaar (RG)
  
• Freeport (EQ2X)
  
• Sebilis (JP)

East Coast includes:

• Permafrost
• Oasis
• Crushbone

Our European [Amsterdam] data center includes:

• Valor (German)
  
• Storms (French)
  
• Splitpaw (UK)
  
• Barren Sky (Russian)
  
• Harla Dar (Russian)
  

Leaper and Glider mounts for levels 30 and 60 respectively are nearly here, but Testers are concerned that they are being left out. After the jump, SmokeJumper‘s announcement on the EQ2 Forums and some player reaction:

We’re putting the final touches on leapers and gliders now. They’ll be Live very soon.

SmokeJumper has posted some time estimates for the server upgrades (which may naturally change based on circumstances) on the EQ2 Forums. I believe this includes Guk, Everfrost, Unrest, Butcherblock, Valor, and Splitpaw.

Hey, folks,

Just a quick update to let you know when the hardware upgrades are scheduled to happen.

Amsterdam and Valor should be upgraded in about two weeks from now (end of the month).

The remaining servers will get upgraded about two weeks beyond that. It’d be great to have everything upgraded by Fan Faire, but we might miss it by a week or so.

Soon!(tm)

From the EQ2 Forums:

The US servers will come down on June 14, 2011, at 7am PDT for a hotfix.  The expected downtime is 2 hours.

and:

Beginning a 7:00 AM PDT on Tuesday, June 14, 2011, subscription and commerce services will be unavailable for maintenance. We expect this maintenance to take approximately 2 hours.

This may also cause some forum accounts to temporarily lose permissions, due to the inability to verify account status while the maintenance is taking place. This is only temporary and normal permissions will return automatically once the maintenance is complete.

After the jump, your update notes for today, June 14th, 2011.

UPDATED: JUNE 18th, 2011

If you miss the pre-Expansion Zone Previews, Interviews with Artists, Animators, and Developers, as well as the quarterly Question & Answer , Developer Chats, and ‘What Bugs You Most?‘, you’ve got company. We’re not sure that 20 minute Stickam videos fully replace all those forms of communication. That said…

There have already been several hotfixes tackling some of the bigger issues introduced by Game Update 60, but there are others which have yet to receive confirmation from developers. We delve into this category today. This is a mixture of bonafide bugs, and also outstanding issues which rise above simple griping into things that are causing significant gameplay problems.

Details after the jump…

From Silius on the EQ2 Forums:

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let all of you know that in the next few weeks I will be pushing tradeskilled items to test with updated stats. This push should make all the current crafted items relevant. Their new growth is derived from the growth established in Velious.

This means they will all be modified to give appropriate stats based on the new mechanics of attributes and other stats. I will need some help from all of you when we push this to test so I can make sure that I have not missed anything. Please keep an eye out for this and thanks in advance.

When faced with a smarmy response from a player that no adjustments to quest or dropped gear will be made to match the stat changes, Silius confirmed what SmokeJumper said in a previous post:

Who says this is not being done?

Two years ago, if you asked me my top 10 list of things that are missing from EQ2, a decent selection of mounts would have been nearly at the top of said list. We’ve seen the expansion of cat mounts, horse mounts, and all variations in between, with floating discs, and more recently the flying mounts which have been restricted to level 85. What comes in between?

Well, we’ve kept an eye on smarmy silly tantalising comments from Tom Tobey (ttobey) and Dave “Covic” Brown suggesting that they’ve been working hard on something to do with more mount options, but we had no idea just what they were planning. If you saw the screenshots of Hua Mein pandas mounted on T-Rexes, you probably thought it was a joke with no intention of seeing the light of the day. Turns out that’s exactly what was planned. Tom has been working hard to modularize characters and mounts so that when a new mount is created, all races of all sexes just “fit” on the mount without weeks of hard-coding locations, and now we know why.

From EverQuest2.com:

Later this month, we’ll be debuting two new types of mounts in EverQuest II.

Leaper mounts can jump up and forward in tremendous bounds before falling, moving at speeds similar to flying mounts. You can control how high you jump, and you can steer while jumping using the movement keys. Obviously, you don’t take falling damage when landing. Leapers require Level 30 to ride.

An enigmatic comment from Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, newly minted Executive Producer of the EverQuest franchise including EQ1 and EQ2:

There’s also going to be a very cool feature announcement this week. Wednesday. Look for it.

and regarding Server Upgrades:

The other servers are coming. We intend to get them all installed in the very near future, but I don’t have details yet. I’ll find out and post something soon (after I get back from E3 probably…early next week).

and regarding the future of Freeport and Qeynos (in response to a smarmy, but not off-base supposition by a player that eventually all classes will be Neutral, and we’d eventually see Freeport and Qeynos merged into a single megacity):

Freeport gets an overhaul first, bringing Big Evil back to the world. (And yeah, guards will almost certainly get bumped at that time.) Then next summer, we revamp Qeynos to bring back Greater Good. You’ll see.

MUCH more detail will be forthcoming at the start of next month when we unveil everything at Fan Faire.

Today’s update addresses numerous complaints about the difficulty of the Drunder heroic and raid zones as well as the Citadel of V’uul x2. In particular the Drunder group zones seemed to require Raid gear to attempt, yet lacked any progression of itemization from that gear. We also see some ease-of-use changes to Kael Drakkel contested.

The full notes after the jump…

From the EQ2 Forums:

All U.S. servers will come down for a hotfix at 7am PDT on Friday, June 3, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The Splitpaw server will have its hotfix at 5am London Time on Saturday, June 4, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours. Here are the patch notes:

COMBAT MECHANICS

• Casting Speed increases will work the same as before GU60.

• Reuse and Recovery will once again apply adders *after* multipliers.

• Additionally: Casting Speed will also now apply adders *after* multipliers (this was not the case before) so you should see a slight *increase* in casting speed compared to pre-GU60 numbers.

• Negative Casting speed debuffs will now apply the correct amount of increases instead of max increase at all times.

Rothgar took a moment to respond to almost universal derision of the new Adornments display scheme introduced in Game Update 60:

Thanks for your feedback on the adornment changes.

However, from some of the feedback it certainly sounds like you’re not seeing everything based on an out-of-date UI. I do understand that some of you are using Default and still have issues with the changes, but before we can have a rational discussion about it, we need to make sure people are seeing the changes how they were intended and not looking at broken UI windows.

Not seeing the adornment name in the tooltip is a valid concern that we will talk about. The main reason for going to an icon-based system was to make the examine description more visual and to reduce the overall amount of space required for adornment information now that items can receive multiple adornments of the same slots. You’ll start to see items with more adornments, especially two-handers, and the examine description was getting awfully long. You’ll see we’ve done other things to try to reduce the compexity of the examine window like converting “+10 crushing, +10 piercing, +10 slashing” to just “+10 weapon skills”.

All U.S. servers will come down for a hotfix at 7am PDT on Thursday, June 2, 2011. The expected downtime is one hour. The Splitpaw server will have its hotfix at 5am London Time on Friday, June 3, 2011. Estimated downtime is 2 hours.

Due to a bug which is robbing Raid mobs of their Crit Bonus, most of them have been permakilled on PvP servers until a bug fix can be rolled out. [EQ2 Forums]

UPDATE: You can read more about this issue in a thread started by Silius EQ2 Forums.

We have found the problem and will be hotfixing it as soon as we can. There is an issue on PVP servers causing NPCs to get 0 crit bonus benefit resulting in an unintended reduction in challenge. As a result of this discovery we will be permakilling all current content raid mobs on the PVP servers until the fix is patched to live.

We currently plan on pushing this fix live tomorrow along with some balance adjustments for the all servers. Once again we are sorry for the inconvenience.

Lemilla of Permafrost have done some research to confirm what appears to be an undocumented nerf to Casting Speed which is resulting in significantly slower results. This is not the only thread on the EQ2 forums on the topic. One originally about Swashbucklers also investigated the Casting Speed issue.